20-Year old forest

Curator: Zuzana Jakalová
Exhibition duration: 8th of May 2015 – 31st May 2015
Kostka Gallery, Meetfactory, Prague, CZ

Some arrange domestic archives of photos, videos or Facebook albums, while others set aside significant moments in the form of movie tickets or stamps in one’s passport. What if the thing you wish to keep in your memory is not a birthday party, recollection of your first date or your first trip to Italy, but a complex of emotions, fragrances, and unspecified moments you spent somewhere almost banal – in the forest behind your house?

In his exhibition at the Kostka Gallery, Hungarian artist Gábor Koós captured the slow, subtle passage of time in his closest neighborhood. Both the forest where he spent the years of his childhood and adolescence, and the long and intimate moments he enjoyed with his father and granddad, both of whom were so familiar with South Slovakian nature, here become a monochrome, emotional graphic landscape full of lines and folds, trees, leaves, and brak. The imprints of the trees, here reduced down to an almost sculptural gesture, are not just a memory recording or reconstruction of a remote souvenir, but also an update of personal history at a particular place. They were all created by means of genuine imprints of actual trees, by physical contact of the artist with his so well-known reality and the contemporary shape of “his” forest. The 20-Year-Old Forest installation connects two approaches characteristic of Koós’s creation: imprints of objects from his closest neighborhood and monumental woodcuts. The graphic map of the once lived through[ZB2]  forest, assuming new life in the gallery space, may not render the smell of tree leaves and needles, but points out how important it is to capture one’s emotions and recollections before they disappear.